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Toronto Raptors humbled by Chicago Bulls

It will be a gruesome video session, ugly and full of errors and mistakes and gaffes beyond comprehension, and it will not in any way be fun for the Raptors to sit through it.

It will, however, be necessary because they know nights like Friday night cannot happen too often.

“We have to come in and look at all the mistakes, every single one, and learn from them,” DeMar DeRozan said after Toronto was drubbed 96-80 by the Chicago Bulls at the Air Canada Centre on Friday in the worst performance by the Raptors this season.

If DeRozan was serious about watching every mistake the team made in dropping to 4-6 on the season, they better load up on the popcorn and soft drinks because it’s going to be a marathon session: lax defence, stagnant offence, hammered on the glass, unable to make a shot, listless, unmotivated, at times seemingly disinterested.

Whatever area of the game you want to talk about, Toronto failed at it before a sellout crowd that booed intermittently throughout the night.

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“There’s nothing redeeming about tonight,” said coach Dwane Casey. “Tonight was one of those stinkers you have. We were mentally fried, physically fried, (but) this is the NBA. There’s no excuses.

Raptor Terrance Ross tries to pass out of trouble in Friday night's game against the Bulls. (Rene Johnston / Toronto Star)

“That wasn’t us. We’ve had stretches like that, but not an entire game where we were mentally kind of running in mud, running in place.”

It was a thorough beatdown by a good Chicago team that didn’t miss the injured Derrick Rose a bit. The Bulls took command of the game from the first few minutes and never let go in what was a beating from start to finish.

The Raptors shot a miserable 26 per cent in the first half — missing all seven three-pointers they attempted in the process — and trailed 45-31 at the intermission. From then on it was simply a matter of playing out the string, and even a career-high-tying 37 points from DeRozan couldn’t remove the stench from the game.

“That’s one of the things about the NBA. It’s a long season, it’s a marathon, and it’s how you go through these games and bounce back from these types of games that identifies you,” said Casey. “We’ve got (until) Sunday to think about it.

“I don’t want to get too overly alarmed because you have those — you have about five or six of those a year — but we can’t make it a habit of coming out and not being mentally (ready) and shooting 25 per cent.”

The most maddening thing for the Raptors has to be that their worst game of the season came on the heels of the team’s best, a surprising road win in Memphis. But instead of being able to carry forward the toughness and grit they showed on the road, Toronto wilted in the face of the unrelenting Bulls.

“You can’t let a team physically knock you around the way they did,” said Casey. “We knew that going in. Chicago has always been that way, Memphis was that way and we outworked them. You can’t allow someone to come into your home and outwork you like that.”

And that’s why DeRozan thinks it’s important to sit and watch every gory moment during Saturday’s film session.

“We show in a lot of games that we’re a good defensive team, and then we have our little spurts where we just drop off,” he said. “We can’t have that. Offence is what it is. Everyone can’t make 100 shots every night, but we can be consistent on the defensive end every night.”

The decision to sit Rose — and it was reached after consultation between the player and the team’s training staff — might have been reached with an eye to Saturday. The Bulls complete a back-to-back with a significant home game against the division rival Indiana Pacers and need Rose as healthy as he can be.

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